This is the substantive claim: in 2014 the FAA instituted a diversity initiative which Levitz claims *may* -- again, key word -- have "undermined the agency's hiring pipeline."
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I'd be insulted if I only got considered for a position bc i had enough marginalization points on a test. Part of the reason i don't have a degree is bc i'm trans, but what I want is for employers to not gate on arbitrary certs (and not be bigots), not to give me a tranny pass to not have a cert.
The FAA ATC diversity thing was really crappy, but like you said, they ended it. It was dumb that they did it in the first place (versus a fairer and not insulting way of trying to improve diversity in their hiring pipeline) but anything the present regime will do instead will be explicitly bigoted.
I read a very complicated substack about this…apparently at some point (maybe before Obama) they changed the test. But the test they changed it to had better predictive power for the performance of the ATCs. So they did not sacrifice safety. And that’s a bad inference anyway—you need to *show* it
The article goes into some detail about how this diversity initiative actually worked: ending preferences for graduates of ATC college training programs (but -- significantly -- not the military) and instituting a "biography" section on applications.
Now, to be fair, this does strike me as a fairly transparent way for the FAA to ask applicants about their race and gender without *actually* asking about their race and gender (this is the de facto purpose of diversity statements in higher education as well), but...
Well, according to the 2021 reporting from the CHICAGO TRIBUNE which Levitz linked to in his article, those figures are for one hiring year, and the FAA was hiring for 1,700 positions.
So already here's a basic problem with this analysis: you could argue that the biographical assessment is unfairly privileging some applicants over others -- after all, according to the TRIBUNE 98% of the applicants who made it to the 2nd round passed the assessment...
The problem was not raw numbers. The problem was that the method of selecting applicants led to a straightforwardly less selected pool of hired applicants than prior approaches, with clear downstream effects.
This is not the de facto purpose of diversity statements at universities, at least diverse ones. We need to get a sense of how effectively applicants can reach our students. A good statement helps us understand.
(In math, diversity statements don't really do this - in practice they ask about experience about having taught using techniques that are said to be disproportionately good for underrepresented minorities and about knowing to use some DEI lingo regardless of results.)
Guys like Levitz are so eager to give the benefit of the doubt to BS right-wing talking points because he thinks doing so shows his objectivity. Actually informing his readers falls by the wayside.
And because they don’t see a threat to their rights. If this was a male pundit staring down a female (fired all the men) Harris administration that had just said every company needed to match population percentages so they needed 50% female, I guarantee he wouldn’t be writing “maybe she has a point”
So part of the article's premise is that DEI is bad because a decade ago the FAA instituted a diversity initiative that maybe possibly could have potentially played some role in the Potomac plane crash?
This scene from Breaking Bad is incredibly accurate to the working conditions of ATCs, except 1) the graphics are probably jankier and 2) five ATCs in a room would be an unimaginable luxury in 2025.
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Only 2,400 of the 28,000 people who applied to be ATCs passed the DEI assessment? Okay, how many were hired for how many positions?
The FAA was only hiring 6% of the applicant pool that year!
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So ... seems like it's only guesswork that people weren't making it to the second round based on some DEI criteria.
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My dad used to do the computer programming for ATCs both in the government & as a contracter. DEI wouldn't make my top ten list of issues they face.
It's a really, really hard job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVSKYURgHU&ab_channel=CrimeCity